Further Up the Path

Daniel Yehuda Arié Oz is an Israeli-born musician and the author of four books of Hebrew poetry and micro-fiction. Translations of his work have appeared in such journals as World Literature Today, Italy's Poesia, Poland's Fraza, China’s Foreign Literature and Art, as well as publications in Arabic, Russian, German, Georgian, and Slovenian. In the 2000s, Oz was the founder and lead composer of the Tel-Aviv-based Jazz quintet The Submarine Keys. He was a member of the Israeli poet’s protest collective Guerrilla Tarbut, and he is currently the co-editor with Eran Hada of the Israeli indie press Gnat. Jessica Cohen is a literary translator born in England, raised in Israel, and living in Denver. She translates contemporary Israeli prose, poetry, and other creative work. She shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with David Grossman, for her translation of A Horse Walks Into a Bar. Her translations include works by major Israeli writers including Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon, and Nir Baram, as well as Golden Globe-winning director Ari Folman. She is a past board member of the American Literary Translators Association and has served as a judge for the National Translation Award.

“Just as folk tales and even children’s fairy tales—or perhaps fairy tales that became children’s once humanity matured—are intended to decipher latent riddles and explain them in an experiential rather than theoretical way, so do Daniel Oz’s fables.”—Dorit Zilberman“Daniel Oz’s collection of flash fables, Further Up the Path, is charming for the way they make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. These pieces of prose poetry blend two frames of reference, creating a new world.”—Marcela Sulak, host of Israel in Translation“Welcome to the world of Daniel Oz, dear readers. It is a place populated by unlikely characters who are just as lost and unsure as you and I. But perhaps there is a blessing in all these uncertainties. Perhaps what we don’t know will save us. In these tales—these flashes of recognition—Daniel Oz joins the tradition that begins with the Old Testament and goes all the way to Kafka and Borges to our days. It is a tradition in which a moment enters and we briefly see the lyric flame inside it.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic